CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM
When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with her riddle guessed,--and mediæval civilization arose, founded upon Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin.
Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.
But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the world, Creator and created.
'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above the clouds.
Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the eternal Kingdom.
While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.'
The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil; and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms.
Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his landscape was absorbed by the gods.
To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one.
The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence.
The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only the importance of a link in a chain.
As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a conception of life in which nothing retained independent significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, discovered at the same time the worth of the individual.
And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized.
But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it blended with the Germanic spirit, with the German Gemüth (for which no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the innately subjective temperament of the race.
The northern climate gives pause for the development of the inner life; its long bleak winter, with the heavy atmosphere and slow coming of spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man back on himself. This inward inclination, which made itself felt very early in the German race, by bringing out the contemplative and independent sides of his character, and so disinclining him for combined action with his fellows, forwarded the growth of the over-ripe seeds of classic culture and vital Christianity.
The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined landscape and serene skies, always retained something of the objective delight in life which belonged to antiquity; they never felt that mysterious impulse towards dreams and enthusiastic longing which the Northerner draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, his mists on level and height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body, and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its coming which have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from earliest times.
Vischer has shewn in his Aesthetik, that German feeling was early influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. Rigid pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the hearth.
Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first. Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology.
Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees; and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and Frisians.[[1]]
Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest god, who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light was his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car. Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew their car with a horse's speed.[[2]] As with Freya, an image of the goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce peace and fertility to mortals.
The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by blind Hödur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of beauty.
The Edda has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, then a divine being, encompassing the earth. She might be seen in morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful white woman, who bathed and vanished. When snow fell, she was making her bed, and the feathers flew. Agriculture and domestic order were under her care.
Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld. Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and protected marriage. She was the Northern Juno or Hera.
Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the dwarfs (Erdmännlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly.
They were visible by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when their track was found in the dew,[[3]] a good harvest was expected. Popular belief took the floating autumn cobwebs for the work of elves and fairies. The spirits of mountain and wood were related to the water-spirits, nixies who sat combing their long hair in the sun, or stretched up lovely arms out of the water. The elves belonged to the more spiritual side of Nature, the giants to the grosser. Rocks and stones were the weapons of the giants; they removed mountains and hills, and boulders were pebbles shaken out of their shoes.
Among animals the horse was sacred to many deities, and gods and goddesses readily transformed themselves into birds. Two ravens, Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's constant companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, as its monotonous voice heralded the spring:
Kukuk vam haven, wo lange sail ik leven?
There were many legends of men and snakes who exchanged shapes, and whom it was unlucky to kill.[[4]]
The sun and moon, too, were familiar figures in legends.
Their movement across the sky was a flight from two pursuing wolves, of which one, the Fenris wolf, was fated one day to catch and devour the moon. The German, like the Greek, dreaded nothing more than the eclipse of sun or moon, and connected it with the destruction of all things and the end of the world. In the moon spots he saw a human form carrying a hare or a stick or an axe on his shoulder.
The Solstices impressed him most of all, with their almost constant day in summer, almost constant night in winter. Sun, moon, and stars were the eyes of heaven; there was a pious custom to greet the stars before going to bed. Still earlier, they were sparks of fire from Muspilli, to light the gods home. Night, day, and the sun had their cars--night and day with one horse, the sun with two: sunrise brought sounds sweeter than the song of birds or strings; the rising sun, it was said, rings for joy, murmuring daybreak laughs.[[5]]
Day brought joy, night sorrow; the first was good and friendly, the second bad and hostile. The birds greeted daytime and summer with songs of delight, but grieved in silence through night and winter: the first swallow and stork were hailed as spring's messengers. May with greening woods led in beloved summer, frost and snow the winter.
So myth, fable, and legend were interlaced in confusion; who can separate the threads?
At any rate, the point of view which they indicate remained the common one even far into the Middle Ages, and shewed simple familiar intercourse with Nature. Even legal formulæ were full of pictures from Nature. In the customary oath to render a contract binding, the promise is to hold, so it runs, 'so long as the sun shines and rivers flow, so long as the wind blows and birds sing, so far off as earth is green and fir trees grow, so far as the vault of heaven reaches.' As Schnaase says,[[6]] though with some exaggeration, such formulæ, in their summary survey of earth and sky, often give a complete landscape poem in a few words. He points out that in northern, as opposed to classic mythology, Nature was considered, not in the cursory Hebrew way, that hurried over or missed detail, but as a whole, and in her relation to man's inner life.
'The collective picture of heaven and earth, of cloud movement, of the mute life of plants--that side of Nature which had almost escaped the eye of antiquity--occupied the Northerner most of all.
'The Edda even represents all Nature together in one colossal form--the form of the giant Ymir, whom the sons of Boer slew, in order to make the mountains from his bones, the earth from his flesh, the skies from his skull.'
A still grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots spread in different directions--one toward the race of Asa in heaven, another toward the Hrimthursen, the third toward the underworld; and on both roots and branches creatures lived and played--eagle, squirrel, stag, and snake; while by the murmuring Urdhar stream, which rippled over one root, the Nones sat in judgment with the race of Asa.
Not less significant was the conception of the end of the world, the twilight of the gods (Götterdämmerung), according to which all the wicked powers broke loose and fought against the gods; the sun and moon were devoured by wolves, the stars fell and earth quaked, the monster world-serpent Joermungande, in giant rage, reared himself out of the water and came to land: Loki led the Hrimthursen and the retinue of hell, and Surt, with his shining hair, rode away from the flaming earth across Bifröst, the rainbow, which broke beneath him.
After the world conflagration a new and better earth arose, with rejuvenated gods.[[7]]
German mediæval poetry, as a whole, epic and lyric, was interwoven with a hazy network of suggestive myth and legend; and moral elements, which in mythology were hidden by the prominence of Nature, stood out clear to view in the fate and character of the heroes. The germ of many of our fairy tales is a bit of purest poetry of Nature--a genuine Nature myth transferred to human affairs, which lay nearer to the child-like popular mind, and were therefore more readily understood by it.
So, for instance, from the Maiden of the Shield, Sigrdrifa, who was pierced by Odin's sleep thorn, and who originally represented the earth, frozen in winter, kissed awake by the sun-god, came Brunhild, whose mail Siegfried's sword penetrated as the sun rays penetrate the frost, and lastly the King's daughter, who pricked herself with the fateful spindle, and sank into deep sleep. And as Sigrdrifa was surrounded by walls of flame, so now we have a thorny hedge of wild briar round the beautiful maiden (hence named Dornröschen) when the lucky prince comes to waken her with a kiss.[[8]]
Not all fairy tales have preserved the myth into Christian times in so poetic and transparent a form as this. Its poetic germ arose from hidden depths of myth and legend, and, like heathen superstitions in the first centuries of Christianity, found its most fruitful soil among the people. It has often been disguised beyond recognition by legends, and by the worship of the Madonna and saints, but it has never been destroyed, and it keeps its magic to the present day.
We see then that the inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned by climate and landscape, and pronounced in his mythology, found both an obstacle and a support in Christianity--an obstacle in its transcendentalism, and a support in its inwardness.
[CHAPTER II]
THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC HEATHEN FEELING OF THE FIRST TEN CENTURIES A.D.
The Middle Ages employed its best intellectual power in solving the problems of man's relation to God and the Redeemer, his moral vocation, and his claim to the Kingdom of the blessed. Mind and heart were almost entirely engrossed by the dogmas of the new faith, such as the incarnation, original sin, and free-will, and by doubts which the Old Testament had raised and not solved. Life was looked upon as a test-place, a thoroughfare to the heavenly Kingdom; earth, with its beauty and its appeal to the senses, as a temptress.
To flee the world and to lack artistic feeling were therefore marks of the period. We have no trace of scientific knowledge applied to Nature, and she was treated with increasing contempt, as the influence of antiquity died out. In spite of this, the attitude of the Apostolic Fathers was very far from hostile. Their fundamental idea was the Psalmist's 'Lord, how great are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all!' and yet they turned to Nature--at any rate, the noblest Grecians among them--not only for proof of divine wisdom and goodness, but with a degree of personal inclination, an enthusiasm, to which antiquity was a stranger.
Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians:
'Let us note how free from anger He is towards all His creatures. The heavens are moved by His direction and obey Him in peace. Day and night accomplish the course assigned to them by Him, without hindrance one to another. The sun and the moon and the dancing stars, according to His appointment, circle in harmony within the bounds assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing fruit in fulfilment of His will at her proper seasons, putteth forth the food that supplieth abundantly both men and beasts and all living things which are thereupon, making no dissension, neither altering anything which He hath decreed. Moreover, the inscrutable depths of the abysses and unutterable statutes of the nether regions are constrained by the same ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, gathered together by His workmanship into its reservoirs, passeth not the barriers wherewith it is surrounded; but even as He ordered it, so it doeth. For He said, "so far shalt thou come, and thy waves shall be broken within thee." The ocean which is impassable for men, and the worlds beyond it, are directed by the same ordinances of the Master. The seasons of spring and summer and autumn and winter give way in succession one to another in peace. The winds in their several quarters at their proper seasons fulfil their ministry without disturbance, and the overflowing fountains, created for enjoyment and health, without fail give their breasts which sustain the life for men. Yea, the smallest of living things come together in concord and peace.'[[1]]
The three great Cappadocians, the most representative of the Greek Fathers and leaders of the fourth century, wrote about the scenery round them in a tone of sentimentality not less astonishing, in view of the prejudice which denies all feeling for Nature to the Middle Ages, than their broad humanity and free handling of dogma.
It was no ascetic renouncing the world and solitude[[2]]; but rather a sensitive man, thoughtful and dreamy at once, who wrote as follows (Basil the Great to Gregory Nazianzen):
It is a lofty mountain overshadowed with a deep wood, irrigated on the north by cold and transparent streams. At its foot is spread a low plain, enriched perpetually with the streams from the mountains. The wood, a virgin forest of trees of various kinds and foliage which grows around it, almost serves it as a rampart; so that even the Isle of Calypso, which Homer evidently admired as a paragon of loveliness, is nothing in comparison with this. For indeed it is very nearly an island, from its being enclosed on all sides with rocky boundaries. On two sides of it are deep and precipitous ravines, and on another side the river flowing from the steep is itself a continuous and almost impassable barrier. The mountain range, with its moon-shaped windings, walls off the accessible parts of the plain. There is but one entrance, of which we are the masters. My hut is built on another point, which uplifts a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so that this plain is outspread before the gaze, and from the height I can catch a glimpse of the river flowing round, which to my fancy affords no less delight than the view of the Strymore as you look from Amphipolis. For the Strymore broadens into lakes with its more tranquil stream, and is so sluggish as almost to forfeit the character of a river. The Iris, on the other hand, flowing with a swifter course than any river I know, for a short space billows along the adjacent rock, and then, plunging over it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording a most delightful view to me and to every spectator, and abundantly supplying the needs of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an incredible number of fishes in its eddies.
Why need I tell you of the sweet exhalations from the earth or the breezes from the river? Other persons might admire the multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no time to attend to them. But my highest eulogy of the spot is, that, prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy situation, it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of cities, but because it is not traversed by a single visitor except the hunters, who occasionally join us. For, besides its other advantages, it also produces animals--not bears and wolves, like yours--heaven forbid! But it feeds herds of stags, and of wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind. Do you not then observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I was, to change such a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world? I am now hastening to it, pardon me. For even Alcmæon, when he discovered the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.[[3]]
This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place quite as much for its repose, its idyllic solitude, for what we moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at once, as for its fertility and practical uses. But it is too much to say, with Humboldt[[4]]:
In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings are expressed which are more intimately in unison with those of modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from Greek or Roman antiquity. From the lonely Alpine hut to which Basil withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof of the forest below.... The poetic and mythical allusion at the close of the letter falls on the Christian ear like an echo from another and earlier world.
The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic[[5]]; as Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do not shew the austerity of the cloister.'[[6]] The specifically Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human.
Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild dejection which longs for solitude. For instance, when Gregory had been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in reply, that peace of soul must be man's chief aim, and could only be attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore he loved the quiet corner where he was undisturbed by human intercourse.
He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and shipwrecked beings, etc.
His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There is a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here: 'A pleasant sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in tranquil embrace.'[[7]]
There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the seasons, etc. The expression of Ptolymäos, that when he gazed at the stars he felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in comparison with Basil's words, 'If, on a clear night, you have fixed your gaze upon the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to thoughts of the artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has adorned the sky so wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so planned it that the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its conformity to law....if the finite and perishable world is so beautiful, what must the infinite and invisible be?'[[8]]
For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of eternity: 'If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, what mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?'
Gregory Nazianzen's feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy. His poem On Human Nature says:
For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a shady grove, gnawing my heart out. For somehow I love this remedy in time of grief, to talk with mine own heart in silence. And the breezes whispered to the note of the songster birds, and from the branches brought to me sweet slumber, though my heart was well-nigh broken. And the cicadas, friends of the sun, chirped with the shrill note that issues from their breasts, and filled the whole grove with sound. A cold spring hard by bedewed my feet as it flowed gently through the glen; but I was held in the strong grip of grief, nor did I seek aught of these things, for the mind, when it is burdened with sorrow, is not fain to take part in pleasure.
The classic writers had also contrasted Nature with mind, as, for example, Ibykos in his famous Spring Song[[9]]; but not with Gregory's brooding melancholy and self-tormenting introspection. The poem goes on to compare him to a cloud that wanders hither and thither in darkness, without even a visible outline of that for which he longed; without peace:
I am a stream of troubled water: ever onward I move, nor hath any part of me rest; thou wilt not a second time pass over that stream thou didst before pass over, nor wilt thou see a second time the man thou sawest before.
In his dreamy enthusiasm he likes nothing better than solitude: 'Happy he who leads a lonely life, happy he who with the mighty force of a pure mind seeth the glory of the lights of heaven.'
The same tone constantly recurs in his writings. Human life is but dust, blown by the wind; a stormy voyage, faded grass; kingdoms and powers are waves of the sea, which suck under and drown; a charming girl is a rose with thorns, etc.
Gregory of Nyssa again praises the order and splendour of Nature and her Creator in Old Testament style: 'Seeing the harmony of the whole, of wonders in heaven and in earth, and how the elements of things, though mutually opposed, are all by Nature welded together, and make for one aim through a certain indefinable intercommunion.'
With the pathos of Job he cries:
Who has spread out the ground at my feet?
Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome?
Who carries the sun as a torch before me?
Who sends springs into the ravines?
Who prepares the path of the waters?
And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature--the immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and supports all that exists?
This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the passage in Plato's Phædo, where Socrates says: 'If any man could arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero preserved to us in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods.
Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose habitations had been always underground, in great and commodious houses, adorned with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who are reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence, they should be informed of a certain divine power and majesty, and after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their dark abode to come to us, where they should immediately behold the earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent of the clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his grandeur and beauty, and also his generative power, inasmuch as day is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising variety of the moon in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and the inviolable regularity of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude that there are gods, and that these are their mighty works.'
Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or cloud, a motif which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening scene in Faust, had reached a very modern degree of development in antiquity.[[10]]
Gregory of Nyssa was still more sentimental and plaintive than Basil and Gregory Nazianzen:
When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the lilies at my feet decked by Nature with the double charms of perfume and of colour, when in the distance I see the ocean, towards which the clouds are onward borne, my spirit is overpowered by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment. When in autumn the fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the everlasting and regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of the wondrous powers pervading all things. He who contemplates them with the eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid the greatness of the universe.
Are not these thoughts, which Humboldt rightly strings together, highly significant and modern? Especially in view of the opinion which Du Bois Reymond, for example, expresses: 'In antiquity, mediæval times, and in later literature up to the last century, one seeks in vain for the expression of what we call a feeling for Nature.'[[11]]
Might not Werther have written them? They have all his sentimental melancholy, coupled with that 'delight of sorrow' which owes its name (Wonne der Wehmuth) to Goethe, although its meaning was known to Euripides.
Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature's individual traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and humbles at once.
Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the classic.
But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and pessimistic elements.
The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in self-forgetting devotion and surrender.
Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the world little behind the modern in sentimentality.
What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just given, applies with equal force to the others:
No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of existence and seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the poetry of Homer, it was another poetry.... It was in the new form of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian imagination could compete without disadvantage. It was there that that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of reverie and reflection, which penetrates man's heart and deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes.
Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, however dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set in opposition to each other.[[12]] St Chrysostom wrote:
If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the water's side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance?
The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says (13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see in a glass darkly,' and Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.'
God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in a royal palace gleaming with gold and precious stones; but the wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of stone, but of far costlier material; he has not lighted up a golden candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the roof of the palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an object of great delight.[[13]]
The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not this depth of thought and sadness; but from them too we have notable descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are evident motives as well as religious feeling.
In the little Octavius of Minucius Felix, a writing full of genuine human feeling of the time of Commodus, the mixture of the heathen culture and opinions of antiquity with the Christian way of thinking has a very modern ring. The scenery is finely sketched.
The heats of summer being over, autumn began to be temperate ... we (two friends, a heathen and a Christian) agreed to go to the delightful city of Ostia.... As, at break of day, we were proceeding along the banks of the Tiber towards the sea, that the soft breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that we might enjoy the pleasure of feeling the beach gently subside under our footsteps, Cæcilius observed an image of Serapis, and having raised his hands to his lips, after the wont of the superstitious vulgar, he kissed it.... Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to leave an intimate companion and friend amidst blind popular ignorance, and to suffer him, in such open daylight, to stumble against stones,' etc.... Discoursing after this sort, we traversed the space between Ostia and the sea, and arrived at the open coast. There the gentle surges had smoothed the outermost sands like a pleasure walk, and as the sea, although the winds blow not, is ever unquiet, it came forward to the shore, not hoary and foaming, but with waves gently swelling and curled. On this occasion we were agreeably amused by the varieties of its appearance, for, as we stood on the margin and dipped the soles of our feet in the water, the wave alternately struck at us, and then receding, and sliding away, seemed to swallow up itself. We saw some boys eagerly engaged in the game of throwing shells in the sea.... Cæcilius said: 'All things ebb into the fountain from which they spring, and return back to their original without contriver, author, or supreme arbiter ... showers fall, winds blow, thunder bellows, and lightnings flash ... but they have no aim.' Octavius answers: 'Behold the heaven itself, how wide it is stretched out, and with what rapidity its revolutions are performed, whether in the night when studded with stars, or in the daytime when the sun ranges over it, and then you will learn with what a wonderful and divine hand the balance is held by the Supreme Moderator of all things; see how the circuit made by the sun produces the year, and how the moon, in her increase, wanes and changes, drives the months around.... Observe the sea, it is bound by a law that the shore imposes; the variety of trees, how each of them is enlivened from the bowels of the earth! Behold the ocean, it ebbs and flows alternately. Look at the springs, they trickle with a perpetual flow; at rivers, they hold on their course in quick and continued motion. Why should I speak of the ridges of mountains, aptly disposed? of the gentle slope of hills, or of plains widely extended?... In this mansion of the world, when you fully consider the heaven and the earth, and that providence, order, and government visible in them, assure yourself that there is indeed a Lord and Parent of the whole ... do not enquire for the name of God--God is his name.... If I should call Him Father, you would imagine Him earthly; if King, carnal; and if Lord, mortal. Remove all epithets, and then you will be sensible of His glory....'
How like Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen:
Him who dare name
And yet proclaim,
Yes! I believe...
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Doth he not embrace, sustain,
Thee, me, Himself?
Lifts not the Heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?...
And beaming tenderly with looks of love
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?...
Fill thence thy heart, how large so e'er it be,
And in the feeling when thou'rt wholly blest,
Then call it what thou wilt--Bliss! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it--'tis feeling all
Name is but sound and smoke
Shrouding the glow of Heaven.
Such statements of belief were not rare in the Apologists; but Nature at this time was losing independent importance in men's minds, like life itself, which after Cyprian was counted as nothing but a fight with the devil.[[14]]
There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the first centuries A.D., as a work of God and an emblem of moral ideas. Ebert observes[[15]]
In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the peculiarities and perfect originality of these Christian lyrics. I do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which man appeared to be quite merged, and which makes them such profound expressions of feeling; but in man's relationship to Nature, which, one might say, supplies the colour to the painter's brush.[[16]] Nature appears here in the service of ideal moral powers and robbed of her independence;[[17]] the servant of her Creator, whose direct command she obeys. She is his instrument for man's welfare, and also at times, under the temporary mastery of the devil, for his destruction. Thus Nature easily symbolizes the moral world.
'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the time of night is past and gone, the daylight is suffused abroad, Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious sun, Thou very dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in his Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift his sinful eyes to the clear stars, he urges all the creatures, and heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to weep with him and lament the sinfulness of man.
In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is used symbolically; dark night pales, the light of the world is born again, and the new birth of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true sun, the source of light; 'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the noonday, let the mind know no twilight.'
And Prudentius sings in a Morning Hymn [[18]]: 'Night and mist and darkness fade, light dawns, the globe brightens, Christ is coming!' and again: 'The herald bird of dawn announces day, Christ the awaker calls us to life.' And in the ninth hymn: 'Let flowing rivers, waves, the seashore's thundering, showers, heat, snow, frost, forest and breeze, night, day, praise Thee throughout the ages.'[[19]]
He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured by clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam.
St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with classic culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters, often shew a distinctly modern tone,[[20]] and go to prove that asceticism so deepened and intensified character that even literary style took individual stamp.[[21]] But the most perfect representative, the most modern man, of his day was Augustine.
As Rousseau's Confessions revealed the revolutionary genius of the eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful character, fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the problems of the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of its own passionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to a glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for translation. He said on one occasion:
For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to the shores of matrimony....
Comfortless at the death of his friend:
I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even the light itself, were filled with shuddering.
Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal présent du ciel qu'une ame sensible.'
He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing for it in Nature and solitude, though in vain.
The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, air, water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked and the mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that everything in heaven and earth was a part of godhead, gave him no comfort; it was rather the personal God of the Psalms whom he saw in the ordering of Nature.
The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully expressed than in his words:
I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy God, seek higher.' I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was at fault, I am not God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the beauty of their form.
In another place:
Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all things in them from all sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give all men this message, so that they are without excuse. Sky and earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace of my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my God.
Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same time, the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to him.
The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, the poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the level of true poetry.
Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[[22]]
It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of original national material to serve as inspiration, as the Æneas Saga had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and describe scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the small poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song.
Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[[23]]
Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus does not answer his letters:
Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of his voice. The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur, the hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks have their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in trembling whispers to the winds: what time the light south-east falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the Gargaric grove. Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its hiss, the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their note.... Have the Basque mountains and the snowy haunts of the Pyrenees taken away thy urbanity?... May he, who advises thee to keep silence, never enjoy the singing of sweet songs nor the voices of Nature ... sad and in need may he live in desolate regions, and wander silent in the rounded heights of the Alpine range.
The sounds of Nature are detailed with great delicacy in this appeal, and we see that the Alps are referred to as desolate regions.
In another letter (25) he reminded his friend of their mutual love, their home at Burdigala, his country-house with its vine-slopes, fields, woods, etc., and went on:
Yet without thee no year advanceth with grateful change of season; the rainy spring passeth without flower, the dog-star burns with blazing heat, Pomona bringeth not the changing scents of autumn, Aquarius pours forth his waters and saddens winter. Pontius, dear heart, seest thou what thou hast done?
Closing in the same tender strain with a picture of his hope fulfilled:
Now he leaves the snowy towns of the Iberians, now he holds the fields of the Tarbellians, now passeth he beneath the halls of Ebromagus, now he is gliding down the stream, and now he knocketh at thy door! Can we believe it? Or do they who love, fashion themselves dreams?
The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the correspondences between 'beautiful souls' in the eighteenth century.
Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, and in every way a man of fine and tender feeling. He gave himself with zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop.
It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to Apollo. There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake. The one took the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen, with sympathy and sentiment in addition.
Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they love.'
In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in which he was living, and many copious descriptions of time and place run through his other writings[[24]]; but while he yielded nothing to Ausonius in the matter of friendship, 'sooner shall life disappear from my body than thy image from my heart,' he was without his quiet musing delight in Nature. For her the heathen had the clearer eye and warmer heart; the Christian bishop only acknowledged her existence in relation to his Creator, declaring with pride that no power had been given to us over the elements, nor to them over us, and that not from the stars but from our own hearts come the hindrances to virtue.
Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were the principal themes of the Christian poets of the fourth and fifth centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of Robinson Crusoe romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the beauty of Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of Paradise with much self-satisfaction.
Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the heavens, beating the air with sounding wings, various notes do they pour forth in soothing harmony, and, methinks, together praise for that they were accounted worthy to be created.[[26]]
For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of this time what the long-lost bliss of Elysium and the Golden Age had been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist--the theme of much vivid imagery and highly-coloured word-painting.
Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world with light, all the elements glow in healing warmth; as the shades of night fade, day rises.... Then the feathered flocks fly joyfully through the air, beating it with their wings in the rush of their passage, and with flattering satisfaction their voices are heard, and I think they praise God that they were found worthy to be created; some shine in snowy white, some in purple, some in saffron, some in yellow gold; others have white feathers round the eyes, while neck and breast are of the bright tint of the hyacinth ... and upon the branches, the birds are moved to and fro with them by the wind.
This shews careful observation of detail; but, for the most part, such idyllic feeling was checked by lofty religious thoughts.
'Man,' he cries, 'should rule over Nature, over all that it contains, over all earth offers in fruit, flowers, and verdure that tree and vine, sea and spring, can give.' He summons all creation to praise the Creator--stars and seasons, hail-storm and lightning, earth, sea, river and spring, cloud and night, plants, animals, and light; and he describes the flood in bold flights of fancy.
In the three books of Avitus[[27]] we have 'a complete poem of the lost Paradise, far removed from a mere paraphrase or versification of the Bible,'[[28]] which shews artistic leanings and sympathetic feeling here and there. As Catullus[[29]] pictures the stars looking down upon the quiet love of mortals by night, and Theocritus[[30]] makes the cypresses their only witnesses, the Christian poet surrounds the marriage of our first parents with the sympathy of Nature:
And angel voices joined in harmony and sang to the chaste and pure; Paradise was their wedding-chamber, earth their dowry, and the stars of heaven rejoiced with gladsome radiance.... The kindness of heaven maintains eternal spring there; the tumultuous south wind does not penetrate, the clouds forsake an air which is always pure.... The soil has no need of rains to refresh it, and the plants prosper by virtue of their own dew. The earth is always verdant, and its surface animated by a sweet warmth resplendent with beauty. Herbs never abandon the hills, the trees never lose their leaves, etc.
And when Adam and Eve leave it, they find all the rest of the beautiful world ugly and narrow in comparison. 'Day is dark to their eyes, and under the clear sun they complain that the light has disappeared.'
It was the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among heathen writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, by Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of the fifth century. In Carm. 2 he draws a highly--coloured picture of the home of Pontius Leontas,[[31]] a fine country property, and paints the charms of the villa with all the art of his rhetoric and some real appreciation. The meeting of the two rivers, the Garonne and the Dordogne, in the introduction is poetically rendered, and he goes on to describe the cool hall and grottos, state-rooms, pillars--above all, the splendid view: 'There on the top of the fortress I sit down and lean back and gaze at the mountains covered by olives, so dear to the Muse and the goats. I shall wander in their shade, and believe that coward Daphne grants me her love.' He delighted in unspoilt Nature, and describes:
My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its wide circle. It needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand has touched it is its charm; it is no masterpiece of skill, no hammer with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill up the place where the tufa is worn away.
He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town luxury and country solitude, in his second letter to Domidius, and describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental delight:
You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain with more reason that you stay in the town when the earth shines in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the soil is marked by the dry fissures of tortuous furrows ... the stones in the stream, and the mud on the banks are dried up ... here neither nude statues, comic actors, nor Hippodrome are to be found ... the noise of the waters is so great that it drowns conversation. From the dining-room, if you have time to spare at meals, you can occupy it with the delight of looking at the scenery, and watch the fishing ... here you can find a hidden recess, cool even in summer heat, a place to sleep in. Here what joy it is to listen to the cicadas chirping at noonday, and to the frogs croaking when the twilight is coming on, and to the swans and geese giving note at the early hours of the night, and at midnight to the cocks crowing together, and to the boding crows with three-fold note greeting the ruddy torch of the rising dawn; and in the half light of the morning to hear the nightingale warbling in the bushes, and the swallow twittering among the beams.... Between whiles, the shepherds play in their rustic fashion. Not far off is a wood where the branches of two huge limes interlace, though their trunks are apart (in their shade we play ball), and a lake that rises to such fury in a storm that the trees that border it are wetted by the spray.
In another letter to Domidius he described a visit to the country-seat of two of his friends:
We were torn from one pleasure to another--games, feastings, chatting, rowing, bathing, fishing.
As a true adherent even as a bishop of classic culture and humanity, Sidonius is thus an interesting figure in these wild times, with his Pliny-like enthusiasm for country rather than city, and his susceptibility to woodland and pastoral life.
The limit of extravagance in the bombastic rhetoric of the period was reached in the travels of Ennodius,[[32]] who was scarcely more than a fantastic prattler. The purest, noblest, and most important figure of the sixth century was undoubtedly Boetius; but it is Cassiodorus, a statesman of the first rank under Theodoric, who in his Variorium libris gives the most interesting view of the attitude of his day towards Nature. He revelled in her and in describing her. After praising Baja for its beauty[[33]] and Lactarius for its healthiness, he said of Scyllacium:
The city of Scyllacium hangs upon the hills like a cluster of grapes, not that it may pride itself upon their difficult ascent, but that it may voluptuously gaze on verdant plains and the blue back of the sea. The city beholds the rising sun from its very cradle, when the day that is about to be born sends forward no heralding Aurora; but as soon as it begins to rise, the quivering brightness displays its torch. It beholds Phoebus in his joy; it is bathed in the brightness of that luminary so that it might be thought to be itself the native land of the sun, the claims of Rhodes to that honour being outdone.... It enjoys a translucent air, but withal so temperate, that its winters are sunny and its summers cool, and life passes there without sorrow, since hostile seasons are feared by none. Hence, too, man himself is here freer of soul than elsewhere, for this temperateness of the climate prevails in all things.... Assuredly for the body to imbibe muddy waters is a different thing from sucking in the transparency of a sweet fountain. Even so the vigour of the mind is repressed when it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. Nature itself hath made us subject to these influences.... clouds make us feel sad, and again a bright day fills us with joy.... At the foot of the Moscian Mount we hollowed out the bowels of the rock, and tastefully introduced therein the eddying waves of Nereus. Here a troop of fishes sporting in free captivity refreshes all minds with delight, and charms all eyes with admiration. They run greedily to the hand of man, and, before they become his food, seek dainties from him.
He described the town as rich in vineyards and olive woods, cornfields and villas.
He awarded the palm of beauty to Como and its lake, and although he wrote in the clumsy language of a decaying literature, this sixth-century sketch still strikes us as surprisingly complete and artistic in feeling:
Como, with its precipitous mountains and its vast expanse of lake, seems placed there for the defence of the Province of Liguria; and yet again, it is so beautiful, that one would think it was created for pleasure only.
To the south lies a fertile plain with easy roads for the transport of provisions; on the north, a lake sixty miles long abounding in fish, soothing the mind with delicious recreation.... Rightly is it called Como, because it is adorned with such gifts. The lake lies in a shell-like valley with white margins. Above rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes studded with bright villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards above, while a crest of thick chestnut woods adorns the very summit of the hills. Streams of snowy clearness dash from the hill-sides into the lake. On the eastern side these unite to form the river Addua, so called because it contains the added volume of two streams.... So delightful a region makes men delicate and averse to labour.... Therefore the inhabitants deserve special consideration, and for this reason we wish them to enjoy perpetually the royal bounty.
This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature, even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants.
On a priori grounds (so misleading in questions of this kind) one would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the history of the European people to have produced a Venantius Fortunatus, the greatest and most celebrated poet of the sixth century. His whole personality, as well as his poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then among the Roman elegists and later epic poets that we meet a feeling for Nature which can be compared to his. Like all the poets of this late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon this one beneficent figure. He was born in the district of Treviso near Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before the great Lombard invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig, were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. In the midst of this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the poets by virtue of his talent and purity of character. His poems are often disfigured by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but his keen eye for men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for Nature shews not only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with the inner life.
The lover's wish in On Virginity,[[34]] one of his longer poems, suggests the Volkslieder:
O that I too might go, if my hurrying foot could poise amid the lights of heaven and hold on its starry course. But now, without thee, night comes drearily with its dark wings, and the day itself and the glittering sunshine is darkness to me. Lily, narcissus, violet, rose, nard, amomum, bring me no joy--nay, no flower delights my heart. That I may see thee, I pass hovering through each cloud, and my love teaches my wandering eyes to pierce the mist, and lo! in dread fear I ask the stormy winds what they have to tell me of my lord. Before thy feet I long to wash the pavement, and with my hair to sweep thy temples. Whatever it be, I will bear it; all hard things are sweet; if only I see thee, this penalty is my joy. But be thou mindful, for thy vows do I yearn; I have thee in my heart, have me in thy heart too.
This is more tender in feeling than any poem by Catullus or Tibullus. We can only explain it by two facts--the deepening of the inner life through Christianity (we almost hear Christ's words about the 'great sinner'), and the intimate friendship which Fortunatus enjoyed with a German lady, who may justly be called the noblest and purest figure of her time in Franconia.
This was Radegunde, the unhappy daughter of a Thuringian king, who first saw her father's kingdom lost, and then, fleeing from the cruelty of her husband, the bloodstained Chlotaire, took the veil in Poitiers and founded a convent, of which she made Agnes, a noble Franconian lady, the abbess. When Fortunatus visited the place, these ladies became his devoted friends, and he remained there as a priest until the death of Radegunde. His poems to them, which were often letters and notes written off-hand, are full of affection and gratitude (he was, by the way, a gourmet, and the ladies made allowance for this weakness in dainty gifts), and form an enduring witness of a pure and most touching friendship. They contain many pretty sketches of Nature and delicate offerings of flowers. In one he said: 'If the season brought white lilies or blossomed in red roses, I would send them to you, but now you must be content with purple violets for a greeting'; and in another, because gold and purple are not allowable, he sends her flowers, that she may have 'her gold in crocuses, her purple in violets, and they may adorn her hair with even greater delight than she draws from their fragrance.' Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into her cell, his 'straying thoughts go in search of her':
How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without thee I am o'erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and though thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days, that month is longer than the whole hurrying year. Prithee, let the joys of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a two-fold light return to us at once.
And when she comes out, he cries:
Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival.... Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once more. To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful sheaves together. Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears of corn, yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness.
The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic. We find it in the classics: for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming makes spring everywhere:
Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes? When I see not thee, I am ne'er satisfied. Though the heavens be bright, though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it hide thee from me.
The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem On the Downfall of Thuringia.
'One must,' says Leo,[[35]] 'refer the chief excellence of the poem to the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of the wing to this low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only remaining relative, Amalafried:
When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother, brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from thee. A whole world now lies betwixt those who loved each other and who of old were never separate. If others, for pity alone, cross the Alps to seek their lost slaves, wherefore am I forgotten?--I who am bound to thee by blood? Where art thou? I ask the wind as it sighs, the clouds as they pass--at least some bird might bring me news of thee. If the holy enclosure of this monastery did not restrain me, thou shouldst see me suddenly appear beside thee. I could cross the stormy seas in winter if it were necessary. The tempest that alarms the sailors should cause no fear to me who love thee. If my vessel were dashed to pieces by the tempest, I should cling to a plank to reach thee, and if I could find nothing to cling to, I should go to thee swimming, exhausted. If I could but see thee once more, I should deny all the perils of the journey....
There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where 'the mountains shining with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news:
By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute.
In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her sister's safety all were silent.
Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy, but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find a really poetic idea. For example:
At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, the field is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems. While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.
And:
The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent, with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.
He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when
Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in the soft kisses of the grass.
His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the Garonne and Gers (Egircius):
So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly becomes a sea.
He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great satisfaction.
More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as for the minutiæ of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her own sake.
He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman minds.
In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth and intensity. His touching friendship with Radegunde is, as it were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of classic poetry into a flame.
Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling.
It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.
It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding shallowness and lassitude.
Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic. Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his Conflict between Winter and Spring, as well as in many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[[36]]
His Farewell to his Cell caught the idyllic tone very neatly:
Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!
Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!
Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,
Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,
To meditation oft my mind disposed.
Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs
In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread;
And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined,
Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide,
Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts,
And fragrant with the apple bending bough,
With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile;
While jubilant, along thy verdant glades At dawn his melody each songster pours,
And to his God attunes the notes of praise.
These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the nobler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and hermitages fully bears out this view.[[37]]
The Conflict between Spring and Winter, with its classic suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[[38]] It described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly in the red-gold butcher's broom, captivating us with her changing melodies.
Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert. Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[[39]]; the great forest grove, the grassy meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the thicket stocked with many kinds of game.
At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the asceticism of the poetry of the saints.'
Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.
In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a second Cæsar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden Age.
In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same strong colouring, Paradise.
The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in the much-read Hortulus of Wahlafried.[[40]]
Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.
They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.
There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance:
A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.
With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent of Sabian woods?
He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand. In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often failing to keep pace with thought.
It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at Prün, who, in a postscript to the Conclusio des Martyrologium, gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and hunt.
In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius and Fortunatus, in their charming descriptions of scenery, was now a thing of the past. Feeling for Nature--sentimental, sympathetic, cosmic, and dogmatic--had dwindled down to mere pleasure in cultivating flowers in the garden, to the level Aachen landscape and such like; and the power to describe the impression made by scenery was, like the impression itself, lame and weary.
It was the night of the decline breaking over Latin literature.
And how did it stand with German literature up to the eleventh century? A German Kingdom had existed from the treaties of Verdun and Mersen (842), but during this period traces of German poetry are few, outweighed by Latin.
The two great Messianic poems, Heliand and Krist, stand out alone. In the Heliand the storm on the lake of Gennesaret is vividly painted:
Then began the power of the storm; in the whirlwind the waves rose, night descended, the sea broke with uproar, wind and water battled together; yet, obedient to the command and to the controlling word, the water stilled itself and flowed serenely.
In Krist there is a certain distinction in the description of the Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations of stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the symbolic so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we have a moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the beauty of the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is attributed to Nature:
She grew very angry at such deeds.
The poem Muspilli (the world fire) shews the old northern feeling for Nature; still more the few existing words of the Wessobrunner Prayer:
This I heard as the greatest marvel among men,
That once there was no earth nor heaven above,
The bright stars gave no light, the sun shone not,
Nor the moon, nor the glorious sea.
How plainly 'the bright stars' and the 'glorious sea' shew joy in the beauty of the world!
In the oldest Scandinavian poems the inflexible character of the Northerner and the northern landscape is reflected; the descriptions are short and scanty; it is not mountain, rock, and sea which count as beautiful, but pleasant, and, above all, fruitful scenery. The imagery is bold: (Kenninger) the wind is the wolf of wood or sail, the sea the pathway of the whale, the bath of the diving bird, etc.
The Anglo-Saxon was especially distinguished by his forcible images and epithets. In Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, dark brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the storm, the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire is eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc.
Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of either Scandinavian or old German poetry.
It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible.
The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance.
Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and their home was probably Franconia.
Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own. It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry.
The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway all through the Middle Ages.
The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth. In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the present day to an almost unequalled degree.
It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb and unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of salvation.[[41]] The cleverest fables of animals were in Isengrimen, published in Ghent about 1140 in Latin verse--the story of the sick lion and his cure by the fox, and the outwitting of the wolf. Such fables did not remain special to German national literature, but became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of landscape, animal, and genre painting.